Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute.

I'm Paul Nelson, a fellow of the center, and today I'm joined from Cologne, Germany, by biologist Wolf Eckhart-Learnig.

Dr. Learning is a retired geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne.

Thank you for being with us today, Dr. Lernig.

Thank you for inviting me and having me.

Recently there was a debate held in Canada between Steve Meyer of the Discovery Institute

and Lawrence Krause, a physicist, and the issue of the randomness of natural selection came up.

This is a very important topic, both for the understanding of natural selection, but also for

considering possible alternatives to that process and to its role within Neo-Darwinian

evolutionary theory.

So let me ask you, first of all, does the process of natural selection include what we

might call an inescapable element of randomness?

Well, that's a very interesting, very good question.

You know that usually there's an enormous amount of polemics against any connection between natural selection and randomness.

And especially by Richard Dawkins and many others

and Law and the Council which you have just mentioned.

And well, Dawkins is, according to a poem of 2013, the world's top thinker, and he is especially

fond of denying the connection between randomness and natural selection.

But the point is that we have an appallingly great reproductive

powers of living being, as Dockhansky said it, in 1937. And he mentioned some examples

like the fungus, Lecopadon Bovista, producing 700 billion spores and Zissum William Sofia and Nicotiana

Tabacom respectively, 730,000 and 360,000 seed. Salmon, 28 million eggs per season, the American ESA, 115 million eggs in a single spawning.

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